American ‘trainers’ in Pakistan

The controversy over CIA drone strikes on targets in Pakistan is old news. What you probably don’t know, though, is that we have 100 or so U.S. troops there on any given day as the war on terrorism thaws relations between the two countries.

Back in Vietnam, we called those folks “advisers.” They were the seeds of a much larger war to come, starting out with around 20,000 troops in the early 1960s and mushrooming to more than a half-million soldiers by 1968.

A U.S. military official in Islamabad recently called our troops “trainers,” and cynics with long memories would say that’s intentional. Given your perspective, the words may be interchangeable, just as more and more Americans see Kabul as the new Saigon.

Whatever your take, it’s an interesting development. It wasn’t so long ago that the United States and Pakistan weren’t talking. Now, a range of U.S. and Pakistani military officials are working with each other, even coordinating offensive operations against insurgents along the border of both countries, and we’ve begun to train their army in various areas.

One specialization with possible connections with Fort Sam Houston is combat lifesaver training. Our briefer attended a short course given by our medics in one of Pakistan’s hotter frontier areas. Those soldiers have lost comrades in close-quarters fighting and no doubt had close calls of their own, of course, so the training was an eye-opener for them.

“It was for a group of Pakistani soldiers. About 20 of them gathered around a Special Forces medic and he was showing them how to treat a chest wound,” said the military briefer, who spoke on background recently at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad.

“And I spent an hour just standing there watching the Pakistanis go through this training, and they were riveted. And you could see in their eyes, all of them were thinking, ‘That could be me.’ ”

The briefer thinks the Pakistanis are determined, but conceded it is hard to gauge their morale because the interactions have been limited. You hope that their troops soak up the training and gain greater competence and confidence, enough to win without our help.

Given the mood of the country, few Americans are willing to sign up for a third long war, even if Pakistan has nuclear weapons and Islamic militants edge ever closer to their dream of controlling the inventory. For a war-weary nation and military, it’s a hard sell.

It is also a tough war, the kind that’s likely to see more American trainers in the future.

“As you can see in our own forces sometimes, they’re tired. They’ve been in the fight for a long time,” the briefer said, noting that Pakistan’s Frontier Corps has waged a counterinsurgency campaign since 9-11. “You can see some of the strain, you can hear the fatigue when we interact with them. But that really, in our view anyway, is trumped by the determination we see and we hear and we feel, particularly in the training we’re giving.”